Growing pains

This Friday in the Hague, the 183 countries which have ratified the Convention on Biological Diversity will decide the fate of the world's wild plants. They have been asked to adopt a global strategy for plant conservation. Those fed up with endless documents that seem to do little to change the world for the better may sigh wearily, but this is widely thought to be a strategy with a difference.

Significantly, it proposes that countries adopt 16 clear targets by 2010. This means that for the first time everyone will be able to judge the performance of countries in meeting obligations that they first signed up to at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992.

Why the focus on plants? As any schoolchild knows, they are the basis of life on Earth. They cover the land surface like a fine skin, absorbing the energy of the sun to support the web of life. They provide food, fuel, clothing and shelter for vast numbers of people. They supply medicines for people everywhere, but especially in developing countries, where hundreds of millions depend on wild plants for traditional health treatments.

Plants protect the planet by controlling flooding, governing the climate and maintaining the Earth's environmental balance. They provide ecosystem infrastructure and habitat for animal life. In short, they play a fundamental, if greatly under-appreciated, role in sustaining the world economy.

Yet plants are in real danger of extinction all over the world by the familiar culprits: habitat loss, destructive development, over-consumption of resources, climate change and the spread of invasive species. Despite a plethora of programmes and plans, the conservation of wild plants is slipping through the net. The stark fact is that as many as two-thirds of an estimated 35,000 flowering plants are in danger of extinction in the wild during the 21st century. Their disappearance sets one of the greatest challenges for the global community.

The new move to put plants on the map really began in 1999, when more than 5,000 botanists from over 100 countries met in St Louis, Missouri, at the XVIth Botanical Congress. Recognising the problem, they called for plant conservation to be made a global priority, and for the establishment of a coordinating body under the UN.

A year later, the Convention on Biological Diversity decided to consider the establishment of a strategy for plant conservation, and a series of meetings brought together a distinguished coalition of plant conservationists from botanical gardens and the wild plant communities. All agreed that they had to come up with something bold, imaginative, practical and flexible.

A gargantuan effort - involving governments and non-government groups - has now completed the work.

So what are the targets and what are their implications? One target will stipulate that all governments should save 60% of the world's threatened species in the places that they grow by 2010. This does not mean that the other 40% can be ignored, but it injects some urgency into existing species recovery programmes. In the UK, for instance, we know that half of all our endangered plants grows outside nature reserves, so a special effort will be needed to protect them. Further afield, more effort will be needed to identify priorities to help target limited conservation efforts.

Another target insists that 50% of the planet's most important areas for plant diversity should be properly looked at. Again, this does not mean that the other half will be handed over to the developers. Rather, it represents a realistic assessment of what can be achieved by 2010.

The strategy is not only for nature but for the millions of people who depend directly on wild plants. If adopted it will not just help protect the rainforest but support those whose livelihoods depend on plants. It should, for example, guarantee the future of Costa Rican plants used for medicines, and help those who harvest cork oak for wine bottling in Europe. It will help fill in gaps, and harness and nurture the expertise that exists already to support plant conservation.

But it will take courage by ministers to sign up because it invites scrutiny - something that the British government has, to its credit, welcomed in the past few years. Failure to rise to this challenge will, however, consign the plant life of this planet to oblivion.